Mahdi

Mahdi (Arabic, “the rightly guided one”), Islamic term whose basic meaning denotes the one who restores the faith to its pristine state and justice to the world. Neither the word nor the idea appear in the Koran, and they are not of equal importance for all Muslims: while they are central to Imami and Ismaili Shiism, they have never become fundamental to Sunni doctrine, even though accepted by many Sunnis and Sufis.

In addition to its basic meaning today, the word has a variety of other usages and overtones, especially chiliastic. It may have first been used simply as an honorific title, but by the time of the second “civil war” of Islam (ad 684-692) it acquired its present basic meaning. During the eras of both the Umayyad (ad 661-750) and Abbasid (ad 750-1258) caliphates, the Mahdi was sometimes identified with the ruling caliph; some identified him with a present or future descendant of Muhammad—through his daughter Fatima. Early Shiites identified the Mahdi with an Imam attaining temporal power. Later mainstream Shiites retrospectively saw him as a descendant of Imam Husayn. Gradually the role of the Mahdi became increasingly eschatological, so that he became the world ruler who would anticipate the descent of the Prophet Jesus (Isa), before the world's end. Shiite groups that interpreted the death or disappearance of the last (of the line) of their Imams as a divinely ordained “occultation” (as, for instance, the Imamis and the Ismaili Qarmatis and Bohras) tended to identify their hidden Imam with the Mahdi. Since the Middle Ages, some Sunni scholars have found it possible to identify the Mahdi with the occulted Imam of the Imami Shiites on the one hand and to keep to a strictly Sunni interpretation of authority on the other. Historically, a number of individuals have been identified at one time or another as the Mahdi. In the 19th century Sudanese leader Muhammad Ahmad Abd Allah proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi; he and his followers were involved in a rebellion against the Anglo-Egyptian government of Sudan in the 1880s, and succeeded in capturing the city of Khartoum in 1885 (see Sudan: The Mahdi).